Joseph Henrich: evaluation

Transcript context

…You’ve done a lot fieldwork in southern-central Chile with the Mapuche. What would you say is the main thing you personally have learned from the Mapuche in terms of your research? The Mapuche was the main source for an idea that I’m working on now and the idea is that one of the cultural ways I’m interpreting the world is as a zero-sum game and that envy and witchcraft can play an important role in influencing economic behavior and economic development. The Mapuche — I saw clearly that if someone else in the community did well, that meant that everybody else in the community had to do worse, because there is a limited good in the world. An anthropologist named George Foster famously describes this. People would hide when they had a good crop and they brought in a big yield; they would underplay it and try to hide how much they did. They might have had a particularly good fertilizer, they might have figured out a new cropping technique — but that would be concealed from dissemination because of this concern that if people knew they were doing well they would envy them, and then bad stuff would happen to them. Envy and people’s negative emotions — people believe it has a real force in the world and it can cause bad stuff to happen to you. This I think is one of the main challenges to some economic development in some places. Amongst the WEIRD people, how fragile do you think the positive-sum mentality is? Can you readily imagine that 30, 40, 50 years from now we’ve in some way regressed and become much more zero-sum? Or would that be extremely unlikely?…

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